Picture a small figure, painted terracotta, no bigger than a hand, that shows a pair of skeletons caught mid-dance. Their bones are bare, their posture is loose and ecstatic, and nothing about them suggests grief. That is the image the Rubin Museum of Himalayan Art chose for an October session of its weekly Mindfulness Meditation program, a 35-minute video in which teacher Lavina Shamdasani takes a sculpture from the eighteenth century and uses it as a doorway into one of Buddhism's most useful and least comfortable ideas: that everything, including us, is passing. Her talk makes a plain argument. Most of our suffering comes from two habits, pushing away what is hard and grasping at what is pleasant, and both habits cause us to miss the life that is actually happening. The sit that follows, roughly twenty minutes of guided attention to breath and thought, is meant to loosen both habits at once.
The sculpture, which the video identifies as Chitipati, Lords of the Charnel Ground (Shri Shamashana Adhipati), is a protector figure from the Gelukpa school, dated to the eighteenth century. The host, Tashi Chodron, describes it as painted terracotta measuring roughly six and a half by five and an eighth inches, with a depth of one inch. The catalogue number, C2002.36.1, appears in the video's link to the Museum's collection page, so viewers can look at the object itself.
The details that matter for the meditation come from the host's introduction (around 2:00). A charnel ground is a place where the dead are brought, often in remote areas such as mountaintops. Cremation and sky burial happen there. Sky burial, as Chodron explains, is a solemn ritual in which the body is left exposed to be consumed by vultures, an act that makes the nature of impermanence visible in the most literal way. In early Buddhism, practitioners went to charnel grounds to meditate on death and on how fleeting life is. The Lords of the Charnel Ground are associated with the deity Chakrasamvara and are revered as powerful protectors. A cloth affixed to the back of the sculpture carries their mantra, which asks for protection from harmful spirits, fire, water, lightning, robbery, and ill will.
That mix of skeletons and protection is the point. These figures are not frightening because they have accepted what the rest of us resist. Chodron notes that their demeanor is one of joy, and that they rejoice in their freedom from the trappings of attachment. The image is a sign that the thing we most fear can be the thing that frees us.
Shamdasani's opening talk (starting around 4:30) moves from the sculpture to the reader's own life. She names what changes: "Our bodies, our relationships, our emotions, our professional lives, and our personal lives. Nothing stays exactly as it is." Then she names the problem. Much of our suffering, she says, "comes from resisting this simple truth." When things are hard, we wish they were different and replay them in loops of worry. When things go well, we cling and want the good moments to last forever.
"So, as it turns out, so much of our life is spent either resisting what we don't want, or clinging to what we do want. And in doing so, we often miss the very life we're living."
The key idea is her description of experience itself: "life is made up of an aggregate of moments." If that is true, then the quality of a life depends less on its big events than on whether we are present for the small ones. Presence is what turns an ordinary moment into one we actually experience.
This is where the talk makes its most counterintuitive claim. Contemplating impermanence, she argues, does not have to bring sorrow. It can deepen our capacity to experience life. Her example is a sunset: "We know it won't last. And that's precisely why we stop, pay attention, and appreciate its beauty." She then asks listeners to bring the same attention to a conversation, to people they love, and to the simple pleasures they tend to take for granted. Her closing questions are practical: "if my time is precious, how do I want to spend it? Where do I want to place my attention? What truly matters and what doesn't?"
The emotional center of the talk is a parable about a king. In Shamdasani's telling (around 7:45), an old king asked the wisest people in his kingdom to find something that would comfort him in great difficulty and keep him grounded in times of splendor. The wise men returned with a simple ring. Engraved on it were four words: "This too shall pass."
Shamdasani says the ring worked in both directions. In hard times it reminded the king that difficulty would not last. In happy times it reminded him that joy was fleeting too. The twist is her claim that the second half is the gift: "rather than diminishing his happiness in those moments this awareness allowed him to appreciate the moments even more deeply." The reminder of impermanence did not dull the pleasure. It sharpened it.
This is the logic she wants listeners to carry into the sit. Impermanence is not a threat to be managed. It is the condition that makes attention worth paying. She puts the principle in one line near the end of the talk: "Joy is something we don't need to chase or hold, but is found in our capacity to be fully present when life unfolds."
The guided meditation begins around the twelve-and-a-half-minute mark. Shamdasani starts with the body: find a position that supports alertness without causing discomfort, lower the gaze or close the eyes, since reducing stimulation makes it easier to go inward, and let the hands and feet settle. The instructions are simple, and they are deliberate. Comfort is a precondition for the attention work that follows, not a distraction from it.
Breath comes next, attended to at the nostrils and then at the rise and fall of the body. Around the sixteen-minute mark, the instruction turns to the mind's habit of moving "from one thought to another." The practice she describes is not to suppress these thoughts. It is to notice them, receive them, and let them pass, without the two reflexes she named in the talk: resisting the thought that is unpleasant and clinging to the one that is pleasant. Her phrase for this is "not resisting and not clinging," and she describes the sit as a way of training that stance.
This is the core skill, and it is easy to misread. Noticing that you have drifted is not failing the practice. It is the practice working. Each time the mind catches itself wandering and returns to the breath, it performs the same small act of letting go that the ring story describes at a larger scale. Shamdasani frames the goal as a kind of training in which the ability to savor a moment grows through repetition, not through effort to hold on.
The closing movement (near the thirty-four-minute mark) turns back toward everyday life. Shamdasani asks listeners to carry the awareness into ordinary acts, and the video's outro ties the practice to the simple experience of eating food, with attention rather than autopilot. Her larger point is that lasting joy is not a special state reserved for retreats. It is available in the next small thing we do.
The sculpture and the sit make a useful pair because they approach impermanence from opposite directions. The Lords of the Charnel Ground face death directly, in the place where bodies are returned to the elements, and they dance. Shamdasani's talk faces the same fact in a modern register, through relationships, work, and the ordinary days that are easy to take for granted. Both insist that the awareness of ending is not a reason to turn away from life. It is a reason to show up for it.
Shamdasani is careful about how far she takes the claim. She does not promise that meditation removes difficulty, and she does not ask listeners to pretend loss is fine. Her argument is narrower and more useful: the recognition that nothing lasts is what makes presence possible, and presence is where the capacity to savor, and to endure, lives. For a viewer who has ever felt the urge to hurry through a good moment or to ruminate through a bad one, the session offers a concrete alternative.
If the talk has you thinking about the sculpture, look at the object itself through the Rubin's collection page, using catalogue number C2002.36.1 from the video's link, and read the mantra and iconography in context. If the ring story stayed with you, try Shamdasani's suggested question on a single ordinary day: what am I resisting, what am I clinging to, and what am I missing right now? For the practice, the video itself is the best guide. Sit through the full twenty minutes, and when you notice your attention has wandered, treat the noticing as the moment the meditation begins.
